Feet in the Ocean, Head in the Mist

Edges do not come in a much more dramatic form than cliffs and, especially, sea cliffs; two worlds meet, the line between them truncated, snapped, crushed and reordered constantly. Faced with sheer verticality, our brains react in different ways.

Here, the land loses, respite won by a cushion of fallen boulder beaches below, but it is only temporary—waves crashing against those rocks dislodged and rounded by winters past, eventually either wear them down completely, or use them as ammunition, hurled against their parent, to bring down further siblings or, perhaps, to rest a time atop the cliff itself.

Yet this dance, this interplay, comes in several dimensions—not just on one plane, but many. The horizontal, the vertical, time and space, all in one place. When you know a cliff, when you walk it, or sail by often, you begin to realise you are never seeing the same location twice.

We humans have short memories, it helps us cope with the fact we will die, our energy transferred into other forms, rewoven into the fabric of the world. On Hoy—the location of today’s image—the tallest of the islands of Orkney¹, there is a famous sea stack, a 137 metres (449 feet) shard of red sandstone, famous amongst climbers and, seemingly a castle, a bastion against the Atlantic ocean beyond, one rebellious finger held upright, daring wave and wind to do its worst.

This stack, The Old Man of Hoy, always feels ancient, whether witnessed in person or photograph. In our collective memory, it has always been there. Except it hasn’t. It was not there three hundred years ago and, for many of the years after that, it was still attached at the foot by an arch of rock.

Ever since I first ventured north as a wide-eyed and amazed eight year old, I have considered this. It did not take me long to realise that the position of the stack is perilous, that it could disappear, unobserved, within a matter of heartbeats. Something so tall, so seemingly strong, yet so much at the mercy of pounding waves, gone, just like that.

One morning a long time ago, I awoke early whilst camping in Rackwick Bay, just around the corner from the Old Man. It was summer. The sun was already making the tent uncomfortably warm and my friend was still fast asleep. Something drew me outside, to witness the ocean, to stand on that beach full of the cast-offs and leavings of the second largest body of water on our planet, to consider the cliffs and the waves and to inhale that freshest of air, my feet weaving through polished pebbles and boulders of pastel pinks.

As I looked to my right, towards Bunnertoon, the once-ruined hill croft renovated and then lived in by the composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies,² I caught movement from the waters just off the beach. At first, I thought it was a submerged piece of driftwood, large and black, riding low in the water. Then I realised it was an orca, then another and finally a third, a much smaller calf. In those days, I knew them by their now-outdated name of killer whale.

They did not seem too far offshore, moving leisurely southward, following an early morning excursion to the Old Man. I felt I could reach out to them and I knew they could see me. I watched, mesmerised, the sound of waves and curlews, oystercatchers and pipits around me, pulling my ears to the sea and then the land and back again, breathing that oh-so-clean air, salt infusing and preserving the memory. Then they were gone and I looked at my watch. It was 4am.

Rackwick is a special place, a mistaken softening in the cliffs, a fortress gate, traffic able in both directions, but attacked by the ocean still. This bay is special precisely because of those cliffs. It is where we humans are funnelled, as we move towards or from the Atlantic, it is where worlds meet, edges blur and fracture, cliff pulled apart to boulder, boulder to rock, rock to pebble to sand. It is time in a place, each grain or pebble suggesting their own story of wave and wind, a story repeated and reverberating through millennia.

I have not visited in many years, yet it I can still taste the air, hear those birds and waves, and feel the sun on my neck as I watch a sharply black and white family swim by.

There is even a croft in Rackwick called Crowsnest.

Are there cliffs where you live? Do you find them frightening or strangely mesmeric? Have you visited during a storm or perhaps after, witnessing great clean scars where the rock has split and fallen? What wildlife do you tie to such places (I associate orca with them, for the above and their habit of hunting at the feet of cliffs, yet they are waterbound—perhaps a strange association?)? Have you seen sea cliffs from out on the water, the perspective changed?

St. John’s Head, Hoy, in low cloud and sea mist, a waterfall ending mid-air, droplets further dispersed, reds muted by green, blurring in the fog to grey. These cliffs are 352m (1154 ft) high. The Old Man and Rackwick are to the right of this image, just around the corner.

As I mentioned here, I rarely write poetry these days. However, something about the above made me want to try and experiment with Haiku once more, perhaps also due to reading this piece by Beth Kempton.

I couldn’t choose between these two:

Summer morning sun,

Scything orca slick, dark, light—

time in memory.

---

The curlew cries twice.

I surface in old summer—

Orca, four a.m.

I shall be sending out the final post in the first season of Ancestral, Wild Empowerment very soon, which shall also introduce the key idea behind the second season. As that series is predominantly paywalled (with healthy chunks available as a preview and occasional public posts), I would like to point out that there is currently a special offer on annual subscriptions to The Crow’s Nest.

This offer is 20% off the current price, which amounts to a 36% saving on the price of a monthly subscription, and it is only available until the 25th of December. In January next year I shall be raising my subscription rates, currently set to the lowest Substack allows so, if you are thinking of becoming a paid subscriber, now is the time to consider gifting yourself an early Christmas present!

Whilst on the subject of (last minute!) Christmas presents, do have a peek at my Teemill store. It’s still a work in progress and at present I only have two different designs there (on several products—bags, hoodies, tees etc), but shall be adding more next year. I chose Teemill because I’m a fan of the company, who are ethical, organic, and environmentally concerned.

Sales pitch ends here!

Finally, although I know you will all be busy over the coming festive season, I intend to send Edges & Entries letters every Wednesday as normal, barring something unforeseen. As this is the time of year where the unforeseen appears with perhaps unsurprising regularity, coupled with the fact you are likely to also be rather busy and might not have time to read any letters you receive, I’d like to wish you a very merry midwinter, however you celebrate (or even if you don’t, I still think it is worth pausing at this moment in the calendar, looking back, looking at where you are now, and looking forward).

Take care my friends, and thank you for reading and joining me here this year, I really do appreciate each and every one of you.

1. When checking the height of the cliffs in today’s image, St. John’s Head on Hoy, I learnt that the island is the setting for a story by the writer Poul Anderson, and he included a description within. Now, I feel I need to know when he visited, and why—what is it that brings writers and artists to Orkney? Here are his words, which I find quite fitting:

“Steep red and yellow cliffs, sea green in sunlight or gray under clouds until it breaks in whiteness and thunder, gulls riding a cold loud wind, inland the heather and a few gnarly trees across hills where sheep graze, a hamlet of rough and gentle Orkney folk an hour's walk away, my cat, my books, my rememberings.”

2. This piece features an interview with Sir Max, given to my once-upon-a-time English teacher from Stromness Academy, Alistair Peebles. It also mentions a ‘Stromness Bookshop’ which I suspect was Stromness Books and Prints (my favourite bookshop in the whole world, so far), a place I have talked of here before, when I discussed The Wheel of Time (piece now paywalled, so I’m copying the relevant section here):

“When I was young, my parents gave me a £10 a month book allowance, and I would spend a LOT of time hiding away in Stromness Books and Prints (do take some time to read this if you can, it is a good introduction to a remarkable place, one which makes life better simply by existing). It is still my favourite bookshop in the entire world, and I’ve been in a few. At that time, when carefully spending my book allowance, I was watched over by the remarkable bookseller Tam*, who very quickly understood exactly what I wanted to read — vast, huge and thick doorstops of fantasy, the longer, the better, preferably in trilogies or series of five or more. Basically, I was a wordaholic, and I devoured epic after epic. Not all have stayed in my memory, but some played a very important role in my development as a reader and a writer.

*That the father of one of the principal characters in the Wheel of Time was also called Tam was a fact I cherished. It felt like a strange secret — and I never knew if Tam himself knew his namesake even existed. I like to think that if I had ever had the chance to talk to him about literature later in my life, about how my tastes grew and explored, how I came to love George Mackay Brown, for example, Tam would have been happy. I do not think he judged teenage me, however, not at all — I think he knew that the key to the love of reading is to read, and read what you love. A simple statement, but one which is often forgotten. If you are forced to read a book and do not enjoy it, it can taint your love of reading. Better to simply suck in those words you enjoy, until the craving becomes too great and your tastes expand naturally. Tam died last year, but he lives on in the memory and libraries of tens of thousands of people. That is a real legacy.”